Scott Voelker: Monetizing Your Audience

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Hey, fastlaners. Ryan, Daniel Moran here with Freedom Fast Lane. Hey. Here on the show, we talk a lot about creating businesses. And it's my opinion that one of the most effective ways to guarantee that a business is going to be successful and be profitable for a long time is by having a responsive audience. We talked about how to build that audience on a previous podcast called, Fittingly, how to Build a Profitable Audience. And I promised that we talk about monetizing that audience on an upcoming show. Well, rather than pull something out of my rear on this one, I decided to call in a friend. Decided to phone a friend on this one. My buddy Scott Volker has had meteoric success with his podcast and with his following. He's built an incredibly responsive audience in really no time flat. I wanted to have him on to talk about how he built that audience, what it looked like, what roadblocks he hit, and as a result of building that audience. And most importantly, what did the transition look like when you started to monetize that audience? You find out that the process was really simple and it kind of demystifies all of the questions behind monetizing a profitable audience. So consider this a case study of somebody who's built a really successful, profitable audience and has monetized it very successfully. And he's just beginning. His success that he has had in monetizing that audience is just in its infant stages and is continuing to grow, as does his audience. He really started this process, like six or eight months ago, and he's had meteoric success. Consider this an example of someone who started from nothing and built up a successful, responsive audience and monetized it very quickly and done it a way that was cool and ethical and sustainable. And it's really a process that is duplicable. So you can take a lot of nuggets from this and implement it into whatever business it is that you're starting, assuming that it's a fit to also build an audience around that business. And that is how you really create long term sustainable fans and profit and growth. So enjoy today's show with Scott Volker. Scott Volker, welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. Hey.

Hey, Ryan. This is awesome, man. I'm so glad to be here and I'm very pumped up.

Well, I hope you're pumped up. I'm gonna pump you down now by calling you out in public and saying that you are my enemy. Because. Because I gauge how well Freedom Fast Lane is doing based on how I see the amazing seller podcast Rankin. And you're the one person Like, I gotta beat Scott now, because I know you were a listener of Freedom Fastlane. You started a podcast, started ranking in the charts, and now you beat me some days. So I spent a lot of days thinking how I can, how I can wreak havoc on your life, Scott.

Well, it's been, it's been awesome that you've been doing that because now here I am talking to you.

Well, dude, you've been hustling it, man. And congratulations for all you've done. You know, you have this podcast that has all these listeners of you documenting your process of building an Amazon based business. But what I really want to digest from you, because you've done what I think is the hardest part of where a lot of entrepreneurs miss, and it's you have built a really engaged audience and you've done it seemingly from nothing and out of nowhere. Is that an accurate portrayal or am I just missing a lot of hustle that you do on a daily basis?

No, I think you, you hit it pretty well. I mean, yeah, I do hustle. I gotta be honest. I mean, you know, we have a mutual friend and she's my coach, Jamie Tardy. And you know, she, you know, she talks all about hustle. And I mean, I am a hustler. And, you know, if you give me something to do, I'm gonna go do it. I'm not gonna think twice about it. I mean, it's all about taking action for me. But yeah, there was nothing there. I didn't have any list or any type of conn. Which right now, talking to you like that happened from the podcast. I actually asked a question if people wanted to go back. I actually asked a question on one of your past episodes. You answered it.

So for me to be on this podcast is because I took action and creating my own podcast, which we can talk about.

Well, this is what blows my mind. For somebody to come out of nowhere and then within like six months, you've got 11,000 people interacting with you in a Facebook group. Not just fans on a page, but active subscribers in an audience. You get hundreds of thousands of downloads a month. And it seemed to happen so quickly. And we talk about building audiences here on Freedom Fast Lane. And we're going to roll into talking about monetizing that audience here in a few minutes. But first, I really want to hear about that process of building that audience because it's no small feat to build that amount of responsiveness. And that's why most people don't do it, because they think it's impossible or really hard. You did it from nothing, seemingly very quickly. So what did the process look like?

Yeah, no, it's great. You actually laid that out perfectly because it's like I personally was going through building my own Amazon business and I have other businesses that I've built in the past and some of them are still running. And so I'm no stranger to the online space. I kind of know that if you have an audience, you can monetize it. But I didn't go at this in the beginning of building the audience and then figuring out how to monetize it. I just wanted to build an audience of people that were like minded that I knew that I would want to hang out with. I mean, that was my whole thing. Now again, I want people to understand that. You know, I had started two other podcasts and two other niches before because I was interested in that stuff, but they didn't really pan out. I did about 20 to 25 episodes and they just didn't get the traction and I just wasn't loving it. So I kind of, you know, just put them on the back burner. I didn't, didn't cost me anything but my time, but it didn't really take off. And I said, you know what, I'm thinking maybe I should do this because I'm having some success on Amazon. And I know that you talk a lot about that. So I'm like, you know, maybe I'll just document the process. I'll do a Pat Flynn thing here where, right, I'm just going to document everything. I'm not going to be this guy that's doing millions upon millions of dollars on Amazon right now. And I air quote that, you know, and you know, basically I just thought that there's people out there right now that would love to be able to hear someone that started from nothing and then built it to something that was pretty substantial for a lot of people. And I said, you know what, let me just go ahead and see if anyone would be interested. So the very first thing that I did, and we hear this all the time, but a lot of people don't put the time in to do it, is I found other Facebook groups that were talking about this topic. The old go into a forum and be useful, that type of thing. I said, let me just go in there and just try to help out people. And I did. And I did that for probably about, I'd say about six weeks, probably maybe eight weeks, maybe a couple months. And I was just in there just seeing what people were Asking. And I would answer questions. I would share some of my monthly income numbers just to kind of show them that, you know, it's not a fluke thing here. You know, there's other people that are doing it, not just the big guys out there and stuff. And then people just started asking me questions, and I was always there answering them. And then one day I said to myself, maybe I should do a podcast on this and document my process. And I was literally thinking to myself, maybe I shouldn't do it, because, you know, I've done them before. And it just, you know, that little guy on your shoulder saying, like, you're gonna do it again. You're gonna waste a bunch of time. You're not gonna build an audience, and then it's just gonna be another waste of time. And I have to give credit to my wife. I'm married with her for 21 years. We have three kids. She's been a huge promoter of me all the way through. And she's like, scott, you're great on any topic that you're talking about that you're passionate about, People love listen to you. You're at a party, people are hovered around you. When you start talking about what you do, and you just have to do it. Just give it a shot, right? You're right. I do. So I went. The first step to kind of validate it is I went into the Facebook group, and I said, hey, listen, I'm thinking about creating a podcast. If I did, would you guys, you know, want to listen to it? Would that. Would that be something that would interest you? And immediately had about a hundred people say yes.

So you had the Facebook group first that you were kind of sharing? No.

Oh, I. This is someone else's group.

Okay, got it.

Yeah. Yeah. So I was just going into other people's groups. You know, maybe one had a 4,000 people in it, maybe one had 2,000 in it. And I was just being value, you know, of value in those groups. The actual group, my group, the TAS group, that group right now, that started about two months after the podcast.

And tell us, like, at what stage did it really start to pick up steam? Because.

In every audience effort, there's, like, a period of gaining traction. And I know this with freedom fast. And it's like, is anybody out there listening? And then it starts to catch fire, and then it becomes meteoric, and it looks like you come out of nowhere and you catch fire. Did you have the same thing with. With your audience as you were engaging them with them in multiple ways And I'm curious if that, if that shortened the curve of response rate. So when did it, when did it really start to catch fire there?

Well, it's funny because a lot of people talk about the new and noteworthy and I know I even contacted or no, you contacted me at one point, said hey, I love what you're doing or whatever, you know, hey, we should chat sometime. And I'm like, all right, cool. And you know, and that's when I was kind of, I think, in the new know worthy and you were kind of seeing that I was in there and I was up, you know, pretty close to the top for a while. And really it started in the beginning when I first announced that I had an episode. I think I had 500 downloads the first day, something like that. It wasn't crazy, but it was better than I'd ever had before. And I'm like, oh, this might be something. The next day I might have had another, you know, 800 or 1,000. And from that day it's never been low, lower than the day before. Unless you're going through. Now we're going in through peaks and valleys because different times of the week and I'm noticing the trends but you know, it's pretty much been a pretty steady growth. But really to promote it or to kind of get that traction, the new and know worthy people always say, well capitalize on that, capitalize on that because once that goes away, you know, and even you said that you're like, you know, wait until after know worthy and then kind of see where things level out because it could, a lot of people experience it's going to drop and then it's up to you if you're able to kind of get it back. Well, being in this space for a very long time, I know how big of a deal it is to have an email list. So I was collecting emails probably a month after I started. And every time I post an episode, I post an email to my list and I say, listen, very simple. Hey, I just posted another podcast on itunes or you can see it on my blog. And then boom, that's it. And that's what I've done every single time that I post one. Now I do a three day a week show too. I do Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So by doing that, I'm constantly staying in their stream. I'm staying kind of front of mind and people love the content. I've had people say, Scott, I've listened to 30 episodes over the past three days. I'm Bing on you you know.

Well, you know, you're. There's a couple things I want to comment on here, and the first is that I think without even knowing it, you utilize what I call the rule of three, which is if you get people to see you in three different places, they. They psychologically or subconsciously know you, like you, and trust you. So you had the podcast, you had the email list, and you had the Facebook group.

Yep.

And this is why, if you're. If you've got somebody you work with, they're a co worker to you, but if you got drinking with them, they're the co worker that you sometimes go drinking with. But if they come over for football on Sunday, now, they're a friend because I see you in three different spots. If you go on three dates with somebody in three different places, that tends to be when bonding happens. And the same is true when you're following somebody online. So you started implementing the rule of three, maybe without even knowing it. And the second thing that you just mentioned is, in regards to your content is I found, and I know from a listener standpoint this is true for me, that for whatever reason, we hear a lot about evergreen content, and that's. And that's really important for long term sustainability, but for short term spikes, news or topical things that are temporary, get the biggest spikes. And if you can spike your audience and then utilize the rule of three, then you get these spikes in engagement from your. Your listenership, going up and getting engaged, and then tying into these different platforms. So I think you did a lot of things right without even realizing it. But, but recently you started, you know, you've got, You've been listening to your audience, you've been hearing more about what they want and have been doing some trainings and such that they've demanded. But I'm curious, what was the process like for you to go from just giving out a ton of content to starting to have trainings and courses? Did the demon on your shoulder come up and say, hey, you're gonna be a screw up here? Or was it more like, this is natural and I want to flow right into this?

Yeah, you know, it was a little bit of both, I guess. I mean, it was like, you know, I knew in the beginning I had no idea how I was going to monetize and when and even if I knew. And again, I'll go back to like, you know, John Lee Dumas. I kind of followed his model in a sense. In the beginning, it was just focusing on the audience, giving them as much value as Possible being the odd one that gives so much information that people are like, why isn't this person charging for this? Like, literally, I had people saying, like, scott, like, you're giving away, like, thousands of dollars worth of content, like, right now. And I'm like, well, okay, I guess, but I'm just kind of sharing the stuff, you know? And so there was. I was holding nothing back.

Right.

And you've always heard, I mean, people saying that all the time, give away your best stuff, you know, and people will still pay you because they want to get closer to you. And that's what I did. I mean, I did, I think, 50 episodes before I even offered anything for sale. And I was nervous of doing that, I got to be honest, because here people are again, and you hear all about that is you don't want to be a sellout. But I also had a lot of private emails from people saying, scott, will you coach me? Will you just one on one, coach me? Will you do a group coaching? I'll sign up today. I'll give you my credit card type thing. So they're literally telling me this, and I'm thinking I owe it to the group that wants it. But I need to be very clear to people that I'm always going to be doing the podcast for free. I'm always going to have a Facebook group for free, but I am going to offer this to the people that want it. That's when I decided to do a presale for my class. Basically, I did the exact same thing that we've all probably heard of. John Lee Dumas talked about it with his podcaster's paradise, where basically you get on a webinar, I call it a workshop, and basically got on there. I taught for 60 minutes, and then I said, hey, guys, listen, I'm going to be thinking about rolling out this class. I want 25 people to sign up. If I get 25, I will create it. If I don't get 25, I'll refund the ones that gave me their money and I won't create it. And in 60 seconds, I sold out 25 spots.

Congratulations.

Thanks.

Yeah, so I don't care about haters. I don't care when people. If people say negative things. When. When I charge money and for the thing to work with me, my fee is a lot higher than it was a couple years ago. In order to filter out that type of person.

Sure.

But I'm curious about your process of going through. You've got. You've. You've trained a group of freebie seekers. There's a lot of people who want to give you money and you're giving them that opportunity. Did you get any pushback and what did that do to your psyche and how did you handle it?

That's a great, great question. Because we all do get that. And it's harder to, it's hard to handle it at first. I think it gets easier within time because you talk to and stuff about it. But I mean, that goes back all the way, I mean, years ago. I'll just give you a quick little story. I used to work for my father as a construction worker. We had a pretty good sized company and we used to always send out these little cards that would ask how our installers did and how the customer service was and all that stuff. And you'd get back thousands of cards that were awesome. You'd get one that was negative. We call a meeting because now we got this one that's negative, but we got a thousand. So the negative always outweighs the positive in our mind. It kills us, right? And it doesn't anything. I mean, if you're selling a Kindle book and you get a negative one, you look at it or Amazon product, you look, look at it and it gets you upset or whatever. But anyway, when it's yourself and not just a product, when it's yourself personally, it does definitely make you say, like, man, I knew it, you know, like. And I did have a couple people, I say a couple people out of thousands, that is that said, oh, okay, now I see, now I see. You gave us all that free information and now you want to charge us something. And I'm like, wait a minute, rewind. You can still go back and listen to all the free stuff. And I'm creating free stuff right now still on a consistent basis for you and you don't have to buy, but all of a sudden you're looked at as this bad person. But I had so many people that said, thank you so much for doing this. I wanted to do this. And I would have actually paid more because I would have even worked with you one on one and paid you three times, four times what you're charging. So, yeah, it definitely did play a little bit in my head. I think that's normal and natural. I'm getting better with that. I don't get it much, I got to be honest with you. But when you do get one, it still makes you kind of think about it. You kind of listen to what was said and you ask yourself, am I doing the Right thing. And that's why really, even with affiliate products, I only have like really three offers of people that, products that I use that I've put my name on. And I'm really, really selective on that as well. I don't just pick it up because I can make money with it, I have to use it and I have to know the people really well. And I mean, you know, I mean, I'm sure by the downloads that you get, you get a lot of people asking, hey, will you have me on the show so I can promote something? And I turn a lot of people away. I mean, there's actually some big companies that offered me ad spots that I turned away, especially in the first 50 episodes. And again, like, you seen me up in the new know worthy stuff, they were, they were contacting me then probably 25 episodes in, you know, willing to give me like 800 to $1,000 a spot. And I'm like, no, I'm not going.

To say no to.

Yeah. And I said, no, I'm not going to do it because I knew that in the future I wanted to use it for my own self. Like whatever I was going to offer, I wanted that to be my ad spot, not theirs.

Okay. So I want to dive into this deeper because you, again, you've overcome a lot of hurdles that, that I talk about in building an audience. And it's the hardest part and is the most important part of having a long term sustainable business. Because if you've got, if you've got a list of tens of thousands of people who know you, like you and trust you, it's pretty hard to go broke. But that process of transitioning into charging for it can be a bit of a brain buster for a lot of people because of what you just talked about. But is that, was there a process ever of you wondering if what you were charging was worth it? Was there ever a bit of self doubt of like, gee, can I like really charge this amount of money for what it is that I want? Did you ever have that thought or was it a pretty easy transition?

No, I did. And it's funny because, you know, when I was talking to Jamie about this, she was with me before I even. I actually hired her, just before I was gonna launch and I was gonna do it for $100 less for the pre. And she says, no, no, no, you gotta charge $100 more than that. And I'm like, really? And she's like, yeah, just, just do that. And I did. And I sold 25 spots.

And then from there, I think my first class after that, I might have thought to myself, am I going to be able to add value of what I'm charging? And then as soon as I heard people telling me what they were getting from it and how it actually helped them, and then now that they're launching products and successfully doing things, I think I'm actually probably undercharging right now at this point. But I'm okay with that right now because I'm still building. I'm building myself, my brand, and, you know, I'm helping those people so they can be success stories to then help in the future.

So you had a little bit of it, but the validation of what you did. Yeah. Overcame that. So I think what you did was smart of testing the offer before you. Before you even charge for it, really. Because a lot of people will build this baby. I like to call it the Golden Turd. They'll polish this golden turd like this perfect golden turd, and then they put it out there and either doesn't sell. It's underpriced, it's overpriced, because it's just. It's. It's a Golden Turd, but it's still a turd, and nobody wants it. And that plays mental games with them. So the fact that you went out and tested that offer, I think might have helped you move past a lot of those kind of mental hurdles that came up. Would you agree with that assessment?

Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I tested that. The. The beta offer was less than a. Probably about $400 less than I'm charging now. Actually, no, $500 less than I'm charging now. And so even at that, I mean, you're talking, you know, $500 to $1,000. That's a pretty big jump. You know, when you're talking, when you're first starting and you're first starting to charge, and I mean, like. Yeah. So, like, when I first started with that offer, I was a little bit nervous to wonder, hoping that it was gonna. I didn't want it to be like crickets.

Right.

When you made that offer, you know, and then all of a sudden, for you to be able to say, oh, guys, I'm sorry, but it's all gone. All the spots are gone. I literally had that recorded, and I did a replay. And at the replay, I probably had about 450 people sign up on an early bird list because they wanted to know when I was going to release it publicly.

You know what I mean? So that whole validation thing definitely Helped me say, holy crap. I guess that I've given enough value that these people think they're going to get even more value, which they will. They're going to be closer, connected to me, so I can almost hand hold. And on a podcast, let's face it, it's all audio. People want to see. They want to see everything happening step by step. So, like, literally, for me to go in and take their hand and have them click on this and click on that, by walking them through every step and explaining it in more detail, I was still able to do it in audio, but people want to see it, so that's why I know that it was valuable, but it was a little bit of a struggle.

So we've done a little bit of name dropping on this podcast, so I'll keep it going. My mentor, Travis Sago, likes to say it's really easy and quick to test offers if you focus on the perspective of testing rather than, this is my new life direction, which is what we tend to do with ourselves. Once we put something together, it's like we're giving up the world to go in a new direction. My mentor Travis says it's really easy to just test something and get some data and some feedback and to find out if people even want it. I remember we did a course together a few years ago. It was a great course, and I polished this. I won't call it a turd because it was a great course, but I polished this thing together and it sold only okay. And his perspective was, why don't we just test the offer? And it was like, I wish I had listened to his advice way earlier than I had received it. So your. Your. Your strategy of just going out and. And testing it, I think is a smart one. So let's zoom out a bit, and I kind of dial this into exactly how Scott has gotten to this point. So you started out in some groups where there was already an audience, and you went to the audience, you provided value to that audience, and you did a little bit of a test offer to them. Hey, if I started talking about this stuff, would you want to follow? Yes. So you started doing that, and you leveraged a channel. The channel that you leveraged was itunes. You started working your way up, and so momentum started to build. And then you listened to your audience and you started releasing some courses and some coaching and some training around what people were demanding on the way up as the audience was building, were you doing anything out of the ordinary? Were you doing anything to accelerate the downloads? Were you Doing anything ninja to get the audience engaged? Or was it just a natural progression of the content spreading on a channel own that got people rallying behind your message?

Yeah, I think the latter, definitely. I mean, it's funny because, you know, it's funny that you mentioned Travis too, because that's bum marketing guy, right? Isn't that what he had is that little article marketing thing I found him probably eight years ago, which was an article that he came out with, which kind of like article writing and stuff. And that's actually what turned me on to the Internet marketing space. So let's give him some props on that. You know, he's actually my lead in on that. So it's funny that you, he's your mentor and then, you know, kind of anyway, really cool guy too. And I followed him for a while as well. But anyway, so my whole thing, like you said, it was a natural progression because I go back all the way to kind of like all of the different things. As you learn as being an Internet marketer, in the beginning, you see everyone and you kind of see who you want to be like and you start going after these little ninja tactics or sometimes black hat and stuff, and you try to find these shortcuts. And in reality, there's really no shortcuts that are going to be long term. So as being in this space for quite a while now, I kind of just said, you know what, I'm just going to go all in with just giving as much value as possible and see where this leads. Because it'll naturally get spread. It'll naturally do all of the things that it's supposed to do without me having to try to manipulate it. And that's really what I did. And all I did was just again, my emails. I was constantly. I still am. I answered tons of emails every day, comments on the blog, all of that stuff. I try to be in the Facebook group as much as I can now. It's kind of taken on a life of its own. It kind of runs itself. But now I go in there once a day and just show my face kind of thing that, hey, I'm still here. But that's really, that's the only thing that I can say. And now being on people's show like yourself, getting myself out there, that's really what I'm working on now is more of how can I spread my message, how can I spread me, right? Because not everyone is going to like me. And I only want people that like me, right? And that want to be with me. It's funny. I don't know if you're into this periscope thing yet, but. But I started doing periscope, and I've been doing that now for probably about three weeks, and that's been amazing. And that's another thing I'm doing just to kind of build my tribe, if you will, where now I'm connecting with people that want to sit in my backyard with me. And I just did a periscope the other night about that. I'm like, hey, guys, you guys are at my party right now and you guys are hanging out with me tonight, right? We're going to have a good time talking about this. And I was kind of talking about social media, and it kind of goes hand in hand with this that you build people an audience, that you want people to be around you and they want to. You guys like each other and you want to maybe tip a beer back with. And I said to them, I said, social media should work like this. You guys are on my back patio right now. If you guys came here and you guys said. If you guys sat down and said, scott, is dinner ready yet? Is it here? Where is the steak? I came to eat, right? I didn't come here to talk. I came here to eat. But with social media, if you treat it that you come in there and you're treating it like that party that's just extended to your house, that you're helping people, but you genuinely want to hang out with these people, then to me, it'll just work itself out. So it's like I said, it's like I want people that are following me to be people that I would naturally want to hang out with. And that's the road I went down. That's the road I continue to go to go down and just like meeting people like you, like, I know you and I could sit down and have a very good conversation as buddies at the bar, not at a podcast.

I'd break your legs for outranking me in the itunes store. That's how that would go.

Wrestle on that.

I think you don't want to mess with me, man. I think a lot of people make the mistake mistake of trying to go of changing their message to appeal or appease to an audience rather than just driving forward with where they want to go. I'll share a personal story, and I know this is Scott's episode, but I'm gonna take the reins here for a second and share a story where for years I worked at building an audience and hit my head against A wall, because I was trying to go to the audience rather than just being me. And I found that by finding my voice and saying, you know what? Screw this. I'm gonna talk about what I want to talk about, and whoever shows up is gonna show up. The people that show up are the people who like what you're doing. So in that way, I call it calling into being. Now, you call your audience into being by what you put out there. Because the people who show up are the people who resonate with what you're putting out there. So if you want to attract a certain type of person, put out there what that person would want. If you want to attract higher level clients, start putting out there what the higher level clients will want to listen and follow. And by doing so, you call into being that type of an audience. So in your case, or even in my case, you start by talking about what the heck it is you want to talk about. The people who resonate start to show up. However, I'm going to throw a little wrench into your argument here, Scott, because you said that two other times you attempted to build an audience and that it didn't catch fire. So I want to hear about what's different between those two. Failure isn't the right word, but it's a catchy word. Those failures versus this massive success that has caught fire and has changed your life and a lot of the people's life. What was the difference?

Yeah, no, there's a couple things that. Because I did look at that, obviously you look at that and you're like, why? Well, first off, I think that the markets that I was going into, one of them was being health and fitness, because I like health and fitness and stuff. So I went into that, I did a little bit of insanity. I lost some weight. I'm not overweight, but I got in pretty good shape. And I'm like, you know what? Cool, I'd love to talk about this. So I started talking about it, but then I realized, I soon realized that you're going to reach an audience possibly, but it's not really going to be an audience that you're going to be able to monetize down the road. Even if it was a year down the road, you could, but it's going to be a little bit harder and you're going to get a mixed bag of people and it's just different. There's just different markets in there. So that just didn't work out for me and I just, I didn't find the passion in it. Because I wasn't finding the right audience. And I probably didn't give it enough time on that one, to be honest with you. The other one was more about just a broad kind of like what I've done over the years to get myself to be able to support my family full time kind of thing. And that was just too broad. And I was too, again, that show, I was trying to be different. I was trying to be the marketing guy. But then also just even my voice, my tone, just the way I talked, I wasn't speaking how I normally speak. In a sense, now that I listen back to it, I just wasn't myself. So then when I decided to do this, I think the big thing was, is that I was gonna go at this as just being myself. It was more niched down. Okay. So it was more of a specific topic where people that are tuning in, they're tuning in for a specific reason. And I had results that we could kind of like reverse engineer and then we can kind of show what had happened. And then from there I knew that I would have bunches of bunches of topics that we could talk about because the questions would just keep coming in. So that's what I think the difference is. Number one, I have a passion for it. I have a really solid result from it that I can share and that kind of gets people inspired. And I just think that this business model being niched down, it just, you're able to really just zone in on that and then help people more on that level than more on a broad thing. You know, for someone coming in that needs to list build, that's one thing. Someone that comes in that wants to do conversions, that's a different thing. And then you got someone that just wants to, you know, with their brick and mortar, they want to get two more people in a day or something, you know, so that was just too broad. So I think being really focused and niched and then, you know, just being myself, I think that's, that's what I've learned from those other two failures, if we'll call them that.

When you went to monetize the audience, you obviously had a bunch of different options. There's definitely a lot of different things that you could do. You could coach them, you could do workshops, you could do classes, you could do an ebook, you could do a training. There's a bunch of stuff you could do. Besides the fact that you just went in and tested an offer really quickly, how did you even identify with the, the first thing you were going to Test would be you were getting all this feedback from people, but was it clear from you from the start what that first tested offer would be or was there a decision making process that went into it?

Yeah, it's a great question, actually. I think what I wanted was what I would have wanted, let's just put it that way. I wanted something that wasn't massive of a course, that felt like it was overwhelming. But more so than that, I wanted it to be community. I wanted it to be something that you just didn't buy. You went through the five modules, you had a little bit of community, and then from there it was over with. I wanted to be able to actually talk to the creator or maybe ask questions maybe every other week or something on a hangout or in a Facebook group. I wanted it to be a community, but a tighter community. Not where it was like 50,000 people in there, like our other group, our TAS group. One of the complaints I get there is that it is getting bigger. So that's one disadvantage of that group. But it's very, very active. So the people that are in there, they're getting tons of value. But I really look at anything. And I've created other courses in like my photography space because me and my. I didn't talk about this. My wife and I owned a photography studio for years. We reversed engineered that, taught that for a few years online. I still have that business, by the way. I teach people, I taught people how I did that process. So really just kind of going back and saying, what would I have wanted and what would I have wanted to continue after I got through this process? So it was really like a great course that taught you, but then community.

But community, that was tight. That was a smaller, tighter group and then also some interacting going on on more of a regular basis. So, like right now we do like every other week we do a hangout and we get on and everyone in the class is able to come on and that's ongoing. So that's something that's going to continue. So even though you buy in and there's no monthly fee to that, but that's basically what I thought of. I said that would be ideal. And I also, I got, to be honest, got to give props to John Lee Dumas. I looked at Podcasters paradise and I'm like, that's a beautiful model that he's got there, right? I mean, he's, he's building a community. He's got raving fans and people that come in, they kind of build out this community. And the bigger the community gets, in a sense, not too big, but for the size that he's going to allow or that I'm going to allow, it's going to get stronger and it's going to get tighter and the kinks are going to get worked out and it's only going to get better. And then we can do like meetups. Maybe we can do maybe a, I don't know, we can do other things. But that's what I was thinking of, rather than just rolling out like this one little two week course or something that was just going to tell them exactly how I did it.

Well, my best friend Mark Jenny has said on the podcast that he now starts with what he wants. There's all we can do, market research and find out what's worked for other people. But start with what would you want to buy? Because a lot of times that gives you the insight that you need in order to create something fantastic. And it sounds like that's exactly what you did.

And testing it though, right? I mean, so I did that. Now, it would have been one thing if I did all that. And then I went and I created the course, right? And then I said, I'm gonna do this thing. This is what it's all gonna look like.

Yeah.

And then I just, I put a price tag out there and then all of a sudden, crickets. And then I'm all mad because I just did all this work and no one showed up because I didn't validate it. And the other thing is, and I didn't do this and I thought about it, but a lot of people were saying that you shouldn't, you should have them vote with their wallet. And I listened to that advice because a lot of people say, yeah, I would love to do that. Yeah, I'll do it. You know, they're not paying you yet, but they'll do it. And then you go ahead and put the offer out and then they don't buy. And then you're like, well, these people said they were gonna do it. So for me to throw that offer out there and tell them exactly what I was gonna create, I didn't even create it, but I said, this is what it's gonna look like. This is the structure, this is how it's gonna be formatted. If you want in, put your wallet up, let's get some skin in the game. And then 25 people, boom, in 60 seconds said yes. And I'm like, boom, we're off to the races.

What was the process after you fulfilled for those 25 people about rolling that out to. Rolling that out to everybody. What was that process?

Yeah, it was very, very, very straightforward. As soon as people purchased, I went ahead and just, I just went all in and I just created that class, like instantly, like probably about. It took me about two and a half weeks to create it. And I was up like late at night. He's putting this thing together. I wanted it to be done, but I wanted to be really good. I got feedback from those people because every time I would do a module, I would release it to the Facebook group because the Facebook group was already going on, the community was starting to build. And then they would go through the modules and tell me what they wanted, added this, that and the other thing, and then I would fine tune it. And then. So then from there, as soon as we got that thing done and everyone was in, everybody was happy. Then I had a prelaunch list that people that couldn't get in on the replay there and they all signed up. And then we did like, I think it was a 24 or 36 hour kind of discount on what it's going to be. Maybe it was like $200 off what it's going to be. And from there we had another 60 people sign up. So from there we had those people in. And then after that. Now how I do it is basically I don't sell on my podcast. I don't put on there and say, hey, join my class. I basically say, get on a free live workshop. And I teach these once a week. Come on there, we'll teach. And then at the end, I'm going to do live Q and A. And in the process I also sell, but I don't tell them that that's how it's going to work. But they kind of know it now. They're all kind of trained. The people that show up, new people, they come on. And again, I'm delivering that value up front though. We do 15 minutes for like a little intro. We welcome everybody in and then we do 60 minutes of teaching. Real hardcore. Five phases, teach. And then from there I do a little bit of a pitch for the class and then I do live Q and A. And then I just keep coming back to the offer before we end that, the discount's going to go away.

Well, Scott, I'm so impressed with what you've done. Congratulations on all your success. We've done kind of a zoom out case study on you building the audience and monetizing the audience. Why don't you tell us A little bit about the audience in the show and where people can find you.

Yeah, no, it's called the Amazing seller podcast. Basically theamazingseller.com that's a blog that I created. It's a basic blog again too. I didn't overcomplicate things. And yeah, really all I do there is I just teach about what I'm doing or explain what I'm doing. I have guests on like yourself, you've been on the show and I've had a lot of other great guests. Just had Steve Chu from My Wife Quit her job, Rick Mulready, Kate Erickson from Entrepreneur on Fire. That's what I'm trying to do too. I'm trying to get people on that I know are going to help the audience. And that's what I would say. Anyone listening? That's what I do there. There's no other thing that I'm doing there other than delivering as much value as I can. And if along the way you think that it's a good time to come in and join, then great. If you don't, no big deal. We will still keep, you know, being friends and delivering value. So that's pretty much, that's pretty much my, my spiel there.

Well, Scott, congratulations on all you've done. Keep up the good work. Keep on changing the world, buddy.

Alright man, thanks a lot for having me on, Ryan. And I'll talk to you soon.

So look, the process isn't hard. Do you hear what Scott did? He started out by going to where the audience was already hanging out and providing content to those audience members. Then he said, hey, if I had my own audience for this, would you follow along? And that's the route that he went as a result of building up an audience by doing that for a while. He said, would you guys want to pay for this? Would you want to dive deeper into the content? Would you want more help from me? And he tested a few offers that had good responses and the ones that did best. He's now building long term systems around to be consistent cash flow streams. That is how you build an audience. That's how you monetize an audience. And you're going to have pushback and resistance along the way. And guess what? Those people don't have to vote with their wallets. That is what I believe to be the most sustainable way to have a long term business is by having a responsive audience. And today we talked about monetizing it. Hope you enjoyed today's show and if you did, let's make this official, head over to itunes and subscribe so you don't miss any of the episodes here at Freedom Fast Lane. Also, in case you didn't know, we're having our first ever live in person event called Freedom Fastlane Live with Shark Tanks. Robert Herjavec, Gary Vaynerchuk, Pat Flynn, Grant Cardone, Travis Sego, Jesse Elder, the founder of Priceline, Jeff Hoffman, and yours truly. That's at freedomfastlanelive. Com. We still have a few tickets available, and I hope you'll be joining us in December for Freedom Fastlane Live. Thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next show.